Irish bores, a Scottish bigot and the worst piece of classical music ever written (Damian Thompson at his best)

Irish bores, a Scottish bigot and the worst piece of classical music ever written

(Damian Thompson at his best)

By Damian Thompson

Soon, all Irish politicians will look like this

From Saturday's Daily Telegraph
Here’s a trenchant headline for you: “Transgender community celebrates 'great diversity of gender identity’ in new book.” And another: “President tells youth groups to be vigilant against racist attitudes and to value diversity in society.” Care to guess which venerable organ published them? Here’s a clue: “Multicultural awards take place in Dublin following three-year break.”
Actually, that last one is a bit of a scoop. To anyone who knows modern Ireland, the notion that Dublin went a whole three years without multicultural awards is frankly incredible. Somebody really screwed up. They’re supposed to happen every month at least. The newspaper is the Irish Times, which these days makes the Guardian look like the bulletin of the Prayer Book Society. Rumour has it that it employs a special nurse to soothe joints sprained by marathon sessions of finger-wagging.
This week was a good one for the finger-waggers. The Irish parliament passed a law stripping political parties of state funding unless 30 per cent of their candidates are women; in later elections the quota will rise to 40 per cent. This means that bright men will be dissuaded from entering politics because the system will fill the Dáil with dim hectoring feminists with DIY Sinéad O’Connor haircuts. (Incidentally, did you know that eight out of the past 10 World Hectoring Champions have been lady members of the Irish Green party? It’s called Comhaontas Glas. Don’t ask me how it’s pronounced: the bizarre vagaries of Gaelic pronunciation were designed to trip up the English.)
Anyway, my point is not that rigged elections will destroy the democratic mandate of the Dáil, though they will. It’s that an especially toxic strain of political correctness has infected almost the entire Irish intelligentsia. Small-government conservatives are treated like lepers – something that, the Guardian/BBC axis notwithstanding, isn’t true of British public life. Meanwhile, the sucking up to minorities is beyond parody: a recent Irish Times profile of the travellers made them sound like latter-day Athenians. How long before there’s a transvestite traveller quota in the Dáil?
Admittedly, the programme of thought reform is not complete: the Irish working class is still instinctively socially conservative. But it is, unsurprisingly, increasingly anti-clerical, and that takes us to the heart of the matter. Churchgoing in Ireland has fallen off a cliff, thanks to the clergy’s dreadful record of committing and covering up paedophile crimes. The moral vacuum at the top of a hierarchical society has been filled by political correctness, much of it imported from the European Union at the height of Ireland’s Brussels-worship.
PC ideology flowers on the ruins of religion. It’s not just Ireland: in Australia, Canada and metropolitan America, the Catholic Church is paralysed by scandal and the old Protestant denominations have turned into gibbering pantheists or angry sects. Secularism is spreading incredibly fast.
And Britain? Here the Church of England is finally losing its grip on public affection. As I say, bien pensant ideas don’t have quite the learnt-by-rote quality that they have in Ireland, but the colonisation of institutions by secular campaigners has gathered pace. The Government’s tired green doctrines don’t resonate with voters; nor does the redefinition of marriage. But political correctness isn’t about voters. These top-down initiatives may be post-religious, but they nevertheless perform a historic function of religion: to make our rulers feel good about themselves.

Doctors who remind us how time travels

The late Mary Tamm, who was Romana to Tom Baker’s Doctor Who, is the third of the actresses who played the Time Lord’s assistant to have died recently. It’s a sad reminder of just how long the programme has been running. I wonder how many young fans realise that the original Doctor was a grumpy old man who shared the Tardis with his granddaughter? William Hartnell would be 104 were he alive today – that is, 74 years older than his current incarnation, Matt Smith. And my beloved Jon Pertwee, greatest of all Doctors, would be in his nineties. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but it makes me feel very old.

Fat chance

My colleague James Kirkup has a theory that Philip Tartaglia, Archbishop-elect of Glasgow, must be a fifth columnist. Why else would he speculate that the Labour MP David Cairns died of being gay? Mr Cairns, who had pancreatitis, was only 44 – terribly young, said Tartaglia, and have you noticed how homosexuals’ bodies shut down prematurely? There’s no answer to such nonsense. But there is an answer to the question of why certain middle-aged men keel over from a coronary. Like Tartaglia, they are very overweight. No offence, Archbishop-elect, but may I suggest that Rich Tea biscuits are a more appropriate accompaniment to your morning coffee than deep-fried Mars Bars?

Twisted logic from America

I’m warming to Mitt Romney. Not to the extent that I think Jesus visited America, but enough. The reason? I’m sick of Obama’s Amen corner in Britain’s Left-liberal press. The commentators I hate also hate Romney.
On the other hand, I’m falling out of love with a certain type of American conservative. I have a Twitter stream of US Right-wingers. Every so often I click on a link and find stuff like this: “The Theatre Shooter Is Caught, but the Real Joker Keeps Laughing,” by Oleg Atbashian of the website American Thinker. His point: the Batman killer “had been exposed to the 'social justice’ rhetoric in school”. Don’t ask why this fact was significant; the author was employing Tartaglia-style logic (see above).
You have to be pretty obsessive to enjoy America’s culture wars as a spectator sport. Both sides talk such dogmatic garbage. After I return from a trip to the US, I find myself strangely cheered by the familiar sound of our politicians’ evasive waffle.

Listen to this, if you’re feeling brave

I have just uncovered what is unquestionably the worst piece of classical music ever written. Like many great discoveries, it happened by accident. I was browsing iTunes and saw an oratorio called “The Peacemakers”, based on texts by Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and – this I had to read twice – Terry Waite. It’s by Karl Jenkins, whose harmonic language draws deeply on the American school of elevator music, and who modestly employs a 1,000-strong chorus for this work.
That sounds gruesome, I thought, but bravely tapped my mouse. And out came… well, I’m sure you’re familiar with the phrase: “Oh. My. God.” Check it out. I dare you.